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Earthworm   Listen
noun
Earthworm  n.  
1.
(Zoöl.) Any worm of the genus Lumbricus and allied genera, found in damp soil. One of the largest and most abundant species in Europe and America is L. terrestris; many others are known; called also angleworm and dewworm.
2.
A mean, sordid person; a niggard.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Earthworm" Quotes from Famous Books



... at Niagara, and fear to see it further deformed. I cannot sympathize with such an apprehension: the spectacle is capable of swallowing up all such objects; they are not seen in the great whole, more than an earthworm in a wide field. ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... sensuousness can also fight, but this combat of sensuousness is not carried on with the affection, but with the cause that produces it; a contest which has no moral character, but is all physical, the same combat that the earthworm, trodden under foot, and the wounded bull engage in, without thereby exciting the pathetic. When suffering man seeks to give an expression to his feelings, to remove his enemy, to shelter the suffering ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... to speak, the Turks of Central Asia will give it the tongues of certain birds to eat. A North American Indian thought that brandy must be a decoction of hearts and tongues, "because," said he, "after drinking it I fear nothing, and I talk wonderfully." In Java there is a tiny earthworm which now and then utters a shrill sound like that of the alarum of a small clock. Hence when a public dancing girl has screamed herself hoarse in the exercise of her calling, the leader of the troop ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... E. Beddard has kindly communicated to me some remarkable variations he has observed in the internal organs of a species of earthworm (Perionyx excavatus). The normal characters ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... dungeon. Yet we are not altogether endungeoned. We are beginning to know our danger and cry "back to the woods," which may yet be the slogan of our next emancipation. It is a long path back for some of us and to cover it at a bound has its dangers. The earthworm shrivels in the sudden sun and to leap from the city block to the depths of the woods is to suffer from the "growing pains" of awakening, atrophied senses. The half-way ground is the pasture which once was the forest, which later was man's, and where ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard

... path which the embryo has to follow from the egg to the adult form is continually lengthening as life advances ever higher. From egg to sponge is, comparatively speaking, but a step; it is a long march from the egg to the earthworm; and the vertebrate embryo makes a vast journey. But embryonic life is and must remain short. Hence in higher forms the ancestral stages will often be slurred over and very incompletely represented. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... sold." Henri Deslois came and stood by the table, so close to me that he could have touched me. He said in a voice that was not quite firm, "I am sorry you have sold it without having mentioned it to me, for I intended to buy it." M. Alphonse wriggled like an earthworm. He made a great effort to laugh out loud, and as he laughed he said, "You would have bought it? What would you have done with it?" Henri Deslois put his hand on the back of my chair and answered, "I would have lived ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux

... was prone to dwell on the "earthworm's slimy brood." Compare Childe Harold, Canto II. stanzas v., vi. Dallas (Recollections of Lord Byron, 1824, p. 124) once ventured to remind his noble connection "that although our senses make us acquainted with the chemical decomposition of our bodies," there were other and more hopeful considerations ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... snails discreetly raise their lid, opening ever so little the shutters of their dwelling; on the level of the water, in the glades of the aquatic garden, the pond snails—Physa, Limnaea and Planorbis—take the air. Dark leeches writhe upon their prey, a chunk of earthworm; thousands of tiny, reddish grubs, future mosquitoes, go spinning around and twist and curve like so ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... the outbreaks at the time of the first rains after a dry season. During the latter the earthworm goes deep in the ground in search of moisture; it finds the spore which has been washed there in past years, swallows it, and afterwards brings it to the surface. The virus is carried with the wool from infected sheep and remains in it through the process of manufacture into ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... house of Murray issued a new work—his last—by the great illuminator of Nature. Its subject was one which no one save those who knew him could have expected. It dealt with "The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits," and in it the lowly earthworm was at last raised to its true rank as the genuine preparer and possessor of the soil. Both Gilbert White and Edward Jenner had been impressed with the work earthworms do in nature, but no one had written ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany

... forest forever. It should be a misdemeanor to chop down a tree, and a felony to clear an acre within its boundaries. The old woods should stand here always as God made them, growing on until the earthworm ate away their roots, and the strong winds hurled them to the ground, and new woods should be permitted to supply the place of the old so long as the earth remained. There is room enough for civilization in ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond

... produced in me. I felt it with intense, with unpleasant, with irritating keenness at this moment. It was the sensation of being borne aloft—aloft—by a force external to myself—such a sensation as might possibly tingle through an earthworm when lifted into illimitable airy heights by the strongly-daring pinions of an eagle. It was the feeling of being hurried out beyond one's depth—caught and whiffed away by the all-compelling sweep of some rabid vigour into a new, foreign ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel

... reasoning which would place alcohol among the foods is very apparent when we put it in the form of a syllogism: All foods are oxidized in the body; alcohol is oxidized in the body; therefore alcohol is food. As logically we might say: 'All birds are bilaterally symmetrical; the earthworm is bilaterally symmetrical; therefore the earthworm is a bird.' Oxidation within the body is simply one of several important properties of food, as bilateral symmetry is one of several important characteristics ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen

... his ear; "this fellow's appetite needs tickling. He is being fed too well and turns up his nose at a common earthworm, does he? Let me ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd

... it there. And stop me if I rave. It's a queer little world, isn't it? I remember you well, but you wouldn't know me. You were one of the highfliers, and I was always more or less of an earthworm. But you'll remember Rotherby, the captain of the first eleven? A fine ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... information?' he said severely. I had to confess that it was. 'And you are supposed to be a judge of news!' he snarled. Well, he seemed so upset about it that I tried to be soothing by asking him if there was an earthworm pestilence in progress. 'No,' answers he, 'and lucky for you. For if the earthworms all died, so would you and the rest of us, including your accursed brood of newspapers, which would be some compensation. Read Darwin,' croaks the old bird, and calls me a ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... even to speak of death, was horrified on seeing them, firmly believing that she would one day be eaten by them—a very general opinion at that time; few people being then aware that the finest mould in our gardens and fields has passed through the entrails of the earthworm, the vegetable juices it contains being sufficient to ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville

... faith; which is the solution of a thousand other difficulties; without which our existence is without aim, our pains without solution, and the Godlike Trinity within our breasts three avenging angels. From the formless earthworm up to the beaming human countenance; from the chaos of the first day up to the present age of the world; from the first faint motion of the heart to its full, bold throbbing in the breast of manhood, the invisible hand of God leads, protects, and nourishes the inward ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... confounds me, monseigneur," replied d'Artagnan, "and I am conscious of a greatness of soul in your Eminence that makes me mean as an earthworm; but since Monseigneur permits me to ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere



Words linked to "Earthworm" :   Oligochaeta, oligochaete, crawler, fishing worm, angleworm, nightwalker, fishworm, dew worm, class Oligochaeta, red worm, oligochaete worm, wiggler, nightcrawler



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